Book review | Death of the Black-Haired Girl: Big mystery on campus makes a taut thriller

Saturday

Nov 30, 2013 at 12:01 AMDec 1, 2013 at 10:25 AM

Robert Stone's latest novel, slimmer but no less disturbing than his earlier ones, plays off the conventions of both the campus novel and the hard-boiled mystery.

Margaret Quamme, For The Columbus Dispatch

Robert Stone’s latest novel, slimmer but no less disturbing than his earlier ones, plays off the conventions of both the campus novel and the hard-boiled mystery.

He lures the reader to expect certain results and then breaks out into another, more serious and open-ended type of work altogether.

The campus in question is a fictional New England Ivy League setting, a close cousin to Yale, Harvard and Brown. Its ornate quads clash with the seedy town that has grown up around it, and the tension between the townies — many of them homeless and drug-addicted — and the students and faculty — also frequently drug-addicted but far more privileged — fuels the plot.

The “girl” of the title is Maud Stack, a brilliant, erratic English major. Her mother is dead, her New York police officer father has been disabled because of emphysema caused in part by his work at the World Trade Center site, and she is at school on a scholarship.

Maud, a lapsed Roman Catholic, is “seriously, determinedly” in love with her faculty adviser, former travel and adventure writer Steven Brookman.

He has enjoyed their sexual relationship but is ready to break it off because his wife, an anthropology professor who grew up in a small Mennonite sect in western Canada, has just told him she is expecting a baby.

The lives of these characters intersect with those of a number of others. There’s Maud’s drama-student roommate, Shell, who grew up in rural Kentucky, starred in some minor indie movies and is being stalked by her ex-con ex-husband. And former nun Jo Carr, a counselor at the college, haunted by her experiences working in Central America.

There’s also Lt. Lou Salmone, who investigates Maud’s death, and Maud’s father, Eddie Stack, who pulls out his old Glock, starts drinking again and sets out on his own crusade to find out who is responsible for the death — a question that turns out to be far more complicated than anyone would expect.

It’s clear from the title that Maud is going to die: What’s less clear is when, why and how. Stone plays with that tension, amping up the reader’s uneasiness and sense of dread.

Even after her death, the tension doesn’t dissipate: Violence leads to the possibility of more violence, and more questions are raised than are answered.

Stone tells a taut little story with reverberations that ripple out beyond this microcosm of a world, raising questions about class and faith.